The main reason why most of these were not merged during the event was that we had trouble with our automated tests. One problem was that many tests that depended on the WordPress.org infrastructure to download Core files, plugins or themes had frequent timeouts. This seems to be caused by a recent move of the entire infrastructure, which made access to the content over CDN very spotty. Another problem was that Travis CI was acting up and was often stuck in “pending” state for prolonged time periods.

During the last two hours of the event, we did a video chat over Zoom with all participants that wanted to join. We peaked at 13 participants to that video chat. It allowed for people to make a more personal connection, which added another dimension to the act of contributing.

We had an ambitious goal of merging 20 pull requests during the event. While we were not able to achieve that number of merged pull requests, I’d consider the event a complete success nevertheless, considering the amount of pull requests that were just waiting to get through the blocking tests to get merged.

The event was also an experiment, to see whether a more direct, interactive form of contribution would attract more contributors. I think it did succeed in doing so, and I think it was a positive experience for the participants.

👉 I would love for people to provide feedback about the event in the comments below. 👈

I’d like to evaluate how well this type of contribution event was received and this will then shape a possible next iteration, where we’ll hopefully get even Travis & Co. to collaborate.